


And I Am Here For the Food

by ermengarde



Category: Bandom
Genre: Christmas, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-10
Updated: 2012-12-10
Packaged: 2017-11-20 19:55:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,505
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/589080
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ermengarde/pseuds/ermengarde
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Brendon is, absolutely, the worst tech support guy on the <em>planet</em>. Spencer likes Lego X-wings. </p><p>Meet-cute involving WAY MORE dust than seems reasonable and not enough time to watch Christmas movies.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And I Am Here For the Food

**Author's Note:**

  * For [red_adam](https://archiveofourown.org/users/red_adam/gifts).



> So, I asked Red_Adam for some prompts... and this fulfils none of them, but does at least mention socks? I hope you enjoy it anyway <3

Brendon is, absolutely, the worst tech support guy on the _planet_. He knows this, he's very much come to terms with it... of course he'd _rather_ be doing a job that he doesn't suck at, but because he doesn't actually suck at the hell desk portion of the job, and he doesn't bitch when he gets rotated onto the phones _far_ more days per month than the number of staff in the whole I.T. department divided by the number of shifts that need covered by phone support would suggest that he should be, his job's pretty safe and no one expects him to do anything hideously difficult on his own (if they ever decide to outsource the helpdesk Brendon is fucked, but for the moment he's fine and he gets left alone a lot with the internet...he's slightly concerned that he's developing a bit of an attachment to the forums at kneehighargyle.com, but really, who knew there were so many different kinds of sock (or that there were so many things _other_ than jizz-catching that you could use them for in bed) and the people there are really _nice_ , and otherwise he's pretty sure he'd have already proved that the internet does, in fact, have an end).

He is only very, very, rarely allowed to go out on the floor to fix things. He's pretty used to having anything more interesting-looking than a toner change snatched out of his hands (which is fine; the last time Brendon had to swap out a network card, he opened up the P.C. and it _went on fire_. It took _weeks_ for the smell of burning plastic to go away. He'd been pretty sure he'd unplugged the machine, so it was obviously possessed and evil. Most computers are, in Brendon's extensive experience) but on the day of the office holiday lunch they're down to minimum manning in the building and Brendon's the only one left in the department (well, him and Bert, the networks manager, but Bert's both a little weird - well, a lot weird, Brendon tries not to be left alone with him in any situation where he'll need to _speak_ to Bert - and currently out cold. Brendon can't _see_ the network team's area from where he's sitting, but he can hear the snoring) so any calls that come in are all his to work on. 

There won't be any calls coming in, there never are, there are about six people in the building _total_ and not one of them will be doing any work, Brendon's been planning this afternoon for a while, he usually brings in his laptop from home and a couple of Christmas movies and goes through his Christmas list (and then spends at least an hour panicking and going through the floor plan of the Hopespring Mall working out the best route around the stores he's going to have to hit on the way home to get all the presents he's entirely forgotten about). He's been with the company for four years, he's got his routine _down_.

 

Except apparently not everyone left holding the fort got the "we do no work here while everyone else is slacking off over pizza on the company dime" memo because precisely twenty four and a half minutes into _The Muppet Christmas Carol_ Brendon's desk phone rings. 

Brendon had gotten himself nice and comfy, with his feet up on the desk and his ass slid right down in his chair, and the shock of the phone going off made him jump and send the chair rolling back out from underneath him. Brendon is pretty much kneeling on the floor when he picks up the call and he can't get his laptop to pause the film, either.

"Uhhhh, HelloI.T.BrendonspeakinghowcanIhelpyou?" Brendon gives up stabbing at his laptop keyboard and just closes it over. He _hates_ hibernating it when he's watching a DVD, but he'll deal with it in a minute.

"Uh. Umm. Hello?" The guy on the phone sounds a bit unsettled and Brendon realizes he's basically heavy breathing into the receiver. 

Brendon hooks his chair with his foot and pulls it back towards him so he can sit down, and snags a pen from the pot on Patrick's desk. Patrick will be pissed if he realizes that someone's used one of his pens, but Brendon's got the whole of Christmas for any missing ink to get magically blamed on Pete (who is technically everyone's boss, but who is most definitely terrified of Patrick. In the way that means he loves him and wants to have his babies) so it's probably fine. 

"Hi, can I take your name, location, contact number and the nature of your issue please?" Brendon is _totally_ professional at this stuff, even if he doesn't have the logging software open yet. Or his computer switched on. He has paper and a pen, he can wing it.

"Is this I.T.?" The guy still basically sounds like he thinks he's phoned homicidal-maniacs-r-us but it's giving Brendon time to switch on his P.C., so it's all good.

"Yes, this is Brendon speaking, how can I help?" Brendon's got his breath back and he's totally doing his best customer service smile. Frank says it makes him look unhinged, but Frank's a Unix dev and not allowed to speak to real people ever at all, so what does _he_ know. The Unix devs all live in their own little reality and at least two of them never wash, and if you start any of them talking about shell scripting then they will talk at you for _at least_ a month, very enthusiastically, and then look really, really bummed when you explain that you have no idea what on earth they mean by _grep_. Frank can be kinda mean but Brendon doesn't like bumming any of those guys out, their enthusiasm is really nice in comparison to the rest of the office who mostly subscribe to the _work's supposed to suck_ school of thought.

"Uh, yeah, hi, uh, my monitor smells like smoke?"

Oh, smoke. Yeah, Brendon knows _all_ about that shit. "Have you pulled the plug on it?"

"Yes." The guy sounds a little like he thinks Brendon's stupid. That's cool, there are a lot of scripts to run through if you're doing the helpdesk right and most of them assume the caller is dumber than a box of rocks, so Brendon's used to people answering as if the I.T. department are the stupid ones (Brendon sucks at teching, but he's never poured sulphuric acid into a keyboard and wondered why it stopped working; he's pretty sure that even without the training he'd have worked out that it was probably related to the fact that it was _dissolved all over the desk_ ).

"Okay, good. Is the smell dissipating, or do you think it might be on fire?" So there isn't actually a script for burning kit, Brendon's awesome at improvising around the basic principles of working out what a caller's issue actually is.

"Seriously?!" The guy sounds a little pissed. "I know we're supposed to be loyal to the company and all of that, but if it was actually on fire I think I'd've, you know, left the building, pulling the alarm on my way out."

"Good, good." Brendon _finally_ gets logged on far enough to click on the call logging software, his computer is the slowest in the whole department. "I just needed to check, you know how it is." Brendon is totally excellent at getting the users to bond with him, and most of that's down to making them think that he thinks that they're smarter than the average user at this computer business. Brendon opens a new fault "okay, so I think we'll just put you down for a replacement, okay, Mr. ..?" 

The guy coughs a little. "Smith, my name's Spencer Smith."

"Okay, Smith, Spencer... oh, hey, are you new? I don't seem to have you in my database?" Awesome. This call's going to take _forever_ to log, the pissed Mr. Smith is going to get even more pissed and Brendon totally won't have time to watch all of _Miracle on 34th Street_.

 

Brendon actually manages to get the call logged in record time - no one else in the building means no one else on the network, means records save in under ten minutes. It's kind of amazing - and even though he takes his time un-hibernating his laptop, taking out the DVD and powering it down (it's old and it's prone to overheating if it's left in hibernate for too long. Brendon does not want any _more_ heat-warped DVDs thank you very much) he still only takes forty five minutes from picking up the phone to arriving at Spencer Smith's desk with a new monitor. It is _spectacular_ service and Spencer doesn't even smile. Spencer Smith is apparently very moody.

"I'll just get this all set up for you, and take this hunk of junk away." Brendon climbs up onto the desk, walking over it on his knees to get to the back of the P.C.. All the computers in the building are set up into corners and things and they are basically a total pain in the ass to get in at and swap shit out if you need it. There's usually a lot of crawling about on the floor involved, and even just climbing over the backs of desks like today involves thumb tacks and Legos doing double duty as caltrops and more dust than should ever be anywhere other than inside a vacuum cleaner. 

Today is all Legos and no thumb tacks, so Brendon's knee is just a little bruised rather than actually punctured. His nice Christmas sweater is covered in gray smudges though, which is annoying, and he'd put actual money on there being dust on his face and in his hair, too.

 

"oh fuck! Sorry!" Spencer snatches the little Lego... spaceship? out from under Brendon's knee and hugs it to his chest.

 

"S'okay," Brendon sneezes from behind the old monitor, where he's having to untangle the V.G.A. cable from the network and power cables. It's like a snake's nest. "No blood spilled this time, so it's all good."

Spencer makes a slightly strangled noise. "Blood?!"

"Yeah." Brendon tugs and knocks the monitor with his elbow. It fucking hurts and the monitor wobbles alarmingly (Brendon is wary of the big C.R.T. monitors they still have here, it only takes imploding one once to make a fairly strong negative impression) but the cable is finally free so he scoots backwards on his knees off of the desk. "Some people leave thumb tacks and things on the floor under their desk? We have to crawl in there in the dark, so." Brendon shrugs.

"Fuck." Spencer looks a little white.

Brendon grins and hauls the crappy old hunk of potentially firey monitor off of the desk and dumps it in his cart. "It's why the I.T. department get to wear jeans, dude."

Spencer's eyes widen at that and he actually smiles back at Brendon. He's got a very nice smile. "Wow, I though it was because you were all nerdy rebels or something, too cool for office wear.. You've destroyed the image I had built up in my head about how our IT section works, you're not like _The I.T. Crowd_ at all."

Brendon snorts, because _The I.T. Crowd_ is awesome, but it's also _British_ and he's pretty sure that that level of eccentricity is an entirely English thing. Although he's also pretty sure that Gerard in the devs thinks that he's a vampire and Pete doesn't know anything very much about I.T., so they definitely got _some_ of it right... "Nah, except for the putting us in the basement thing. They don't generally let us spend time above ground with the normal people."

"Well that seems kind of mean; you're behaving like a regular human being and everything." Spencer is still smiling. Brendon thinks that Spencer should smile all the time; it's a very good look for him. 

"Yeah, but some of my colleagues aren't quite as socialized as me, it's why they put me on the hell desk all the time."

"The H.. oh, right, the phones? That was you, too?"

"Yeah, everyone else is off at the pizza thing today, so just me and the _Muppet Christmas Carol_ down there today. And Bert, but we don't talk about Bert."

"Oookay, I totally interrupted your movie afternoon, didn't I?" Spencer looks a little guilty, which is _even cuter_ Brendon has to turn away and pick up the new monitor so that he doesn't do something stupid, like pinch his cheek (T.F.T., 19", brand new, best there was in the store room... well, it's only fair Spencer got _something_ for working over the holiday lunch).

"Yeah, but I'm on the clock and I'll totally have the _best_ stat time on this call, so, you know, could be worse." Brendon shrugs. Plus, he thinks, there's no way he'd ever have been near Spencer's desk otherwise, the printer's at the other end of the office and those are the only calls he ever gets out to do, and missing Spencer's smile would have been a terrible shame.

Spencer huffs out a quiet laugh, "well in that case, I'm glad I could be of assistance."

Brendon shoves all the cables in where they're supposed to be and switches the new monitor on with a flourish. There's spreadsheet on the screen, Spencer is totally doing _actual work_. "Oh, oh now." Brendon shakes his head. "This is just sad, Spencer Smith, you're not supposed to be _working _working today."__

__Spencer snorts "Yeah, well, new in the job, remember, I needed to get on top of some shit." Spencer's face falls a little at that. "I should, um," Spencer waves his hand at his machine "get on with that."_ _

__Brendon rolls his eyes. Spencer is obviously _good_ at his job. "Okay, okay, look, I'll get out of your way, but..." Fuck it, it's Christmas and everyone else is having a party. "...but you're finishing at five and meeting me in the lobby and then we're going for hot chocolate and marshmallows. "_ _

__"uhhhh." Spencer looks confused, but not like he hates the idea, so Brendon nods, decisively._ _

__"Yep, I can't watch both my movies now, Spencer Smith, so you're going to come out from work _on time_ " (Spencer makes a slightly guilty face at that and Brendon _knew_ it, knew Spencer was one of those that stayed late and put in four million percent or whatever) "and we're going to _live_ the movie instead."_ _

__Spencer makes a spluttery, confused noise, like he can't work out what he wants to say._ _

__"Hot chocolate, marshmallows, watching people skating, possibly _being_ people skating." Brendon nods again and grins at Spencer as he pushes his cart full of broken monitor back towards the elevators. "See you later Spencer."_ _


End file.
